A combined approach to the study of the multi vocal nature of the brand

The paper proposes a research approach that explores user-generated contents (UGC) as expression of brand associations emerging from different categories of actors in social media (consumers, influencers and other online prescribers) to measure their alignment with the company-defined brand associations. This approach is innovative. It is based on the multi-vocal nature of the brand related to the participatory, collaborative and socially-linked behaviors by consumers and other actors that serve as creators of brand stories, thus determining brand associations. It adopts a mixed methodology and combines netnography and text mining to study the multi vocal nature of the brand. More specifically, the observation technique applied to online communities and the phases of an online community research (entrée, data collection, data analysis, data interpretation) derive from netnography. Software applications, to identify brand associations emerging from texts produced by different categories of actors in social media, derive from text mining. The context of the study is the fashion one, this because the consumers of fashion interact extensively by means of digital platforms. The analytical approach adopted in the paper allows to produce three levels of measurements of brand associations matching: the ‘aggregate actors-brand alignment’, the ‘single actor-brand alignment gap’ and the ‘mutual influence-brand alignment’. Managerial implications are presented at the end of the paper.